Usually, a person spends countless hours in studying mathematics and using mathematics to solve problems until he graduates from elementary school, junior high school, high school, and college. However, most people merely memorize mathematical operators and apply them to the problems rather than grasping exactly what each mathematical operator means. After some hours, they forget what they memorized and do not use what they studied and learned for a long time in their daily life.
Thus, the ability to use mathematics in comparison to the time that most people invest in mathematics is at a low level, which makes the time spent in studying mathematics wasted. In addition, even those who have studied and learned mathematics well don't remember even the basic knowledge of mathematics after a certain period. Thus, the effectiveness of mathematics education is questionable in many cases. This phenomenon is caused by the fact that the study of mathematics is too difficult and that there is a great gap between real life and mathematics resulting from not utilizing mathematics in real life.
When a student who wants to study mathematics does not know the exact meaning of mathematical operators and simply starts to study mathematics with memorizing mathematical formula, the study of mathematics will soon become tedious and difficult. Therefore, it is necessary to approach mathematics like acquiring a language, not studying mathematics. In other words, if students can share the principles of mathematics with each other in a manner similar to daily conversations about sports when they communicate with each other about mathematical principles or when they talk about everyday life or the principles of mathematics or science, it will be much more effective than the existing learning method and will be used for a long time after acquiring the knowledge.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a technique for interpreting mathematics as a natural language and allowing it to be accepted as a kind of language such as a conversation in daily life. In other words, a mathematical translator that allows mathematical expressions including certain mathematical operators to be described in a natural language so that they can be described and explained at the level of natural language for everyday conversations rather than requiring complex calculations and high intelligence levels will be provided.
First of all, the prior arts in the domestic and foreign countries known before the application of the present invention in relation to translation tools for mathematical expressions including mathematical operators will be examined as follows.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,373,291 (May 13, 2008) relates to linguistic support for mathematical expression recognizers and presents a new source of information and a linguistic model to improve the accuracy of mathematical perception. In particular, this prior art extends the linguistic model to a mathematical domain and suggests a method of recognizing the artificial language of mathematics in a way related to a natural language recognition. Therefore, this prior art relates to pattern recognition, in particular, mathematical expression recognition.
On the other hand, the present invention does not simply recognize the mathematical expression but translates the meaning of the mathematical expression into a natural language so that the user can understand the meaning of the mathematical expression only by listening to it. That is, according to the present invention, recognizing the mathematical expression is a basic function and it expresses the meaning of the operator used in the mathematical expression in a natural language and interprets what the mathematical expression means.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2015-0363390 (Dec. 17, 2015) describes a method for solving and responding to arithmetic and algebraic problems through natural language processing. It receives an input statement associated with an arithmetic or algebraic problem and determines whether each sentence in the plurality of sentences associated with the input statement is a qualified sentence from a mathematical point of view and translates each qualified sentence into a mathematical equation and narrates the mathematical result in a natural language.
The prior art includes solving arithmetic and algebraic problems and outputting the results by narration. However, the present invention is characterized by translating the meaning of the mathematical operator into a natural language and translating the meaning of the expression provided by the user into a natural language. That is, the present invention does not solve the mathematical equations and provide the results, but rather receives mathematical expressions including mathematical operators and outputs the mathematical meaning of them in a natural language. Thereby, they differ in purpose, structure, and effect.
As described above, most of the prior arts disclosed before filing of the present invention aimed to solve mathematical problems and provide the results. But the present invention is not intended to output a mathematical solution but to express the meaning of an input mathematical expression in a natural language and thereby to cultivate the ability of the user to intuitively explain the meaning of the mathematical expression by a linguistic means.
In order to achieve the above objectives, the present invention provides a method and a device for recognizing an input mathematical expression and translating the recognized mathematical expression into a natural language, and outputting a result of the translation as a voice or a text and allowing users to more intuitively understand the meaning of the mathematical expression and develop their ability to explain it verbally.